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September 2017

The Progressive Octopus Politics lost, culture won. By Victor Davis Hanson

It is the best and worst of times for progressives and liberals.

Politically, their obsessions with identity politics and various racial and gender -isms and -ologies have emasculated the Democratic party: loss of governorships, state legislatures, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

Democrats, for the time being at least, are now reduced to largely a coastal, big-city party. It can certainly pile up lots of blue electoral votes. And, thanks to California, Democrats can capture the popular vote, without necessarily winning presidential elections.

The old liberal idea that the new demography is progressive destiny did not work out as planned. when the Blue Wall crumbled; Hillary Clinton lost a sure-thing election. Large Latino populations in red Texas and blue California are not likely to turn either one into a swing state. Inner-city voters so far have not transferred prior record levels of turn-out and bloc voting to candidates of the Hillary Clinton sort. Identity politics did not ensure that the white liberals who created it were always exempt from the natural boomerang of their own ideology.

24/7 Sermonizing

Yet culturally, the progressive octopus continues to recalibrate popular life according to the new orthodoxies shared by a minority of the population.

Indeed, the octopus has formidable and far-reaching tentacles that reach into every crevice of modern American life. Our progressive mollusk is big, and he swims with us everywhere.

Most Americans are quite willing to concede spheres of partisanship — but not lawlessness. Some colleges, such as Evergreen State or UC Berkeley, while public and tax-supported, are, by definition, leftist in the manner that a private Hillsdale College or Saint Thomas Aquinas are traditionalist and conservative. But whereas the latter are calm and tolerant of dissent; the former, with public monies, are hysterical and often Stalinist when confronted by opposing views. That disconnect is unsustainable.

Most citizens are fine with the fact that Fox News is the conservative cable-channel bookend to the progressive MSNBC. Americans realize that a different sort of crowd goes to a NASCAR race than watches the Tour de France.

But what is bothering half the country is not such ideological birds-of-a-feather tribalism per se. The rub instead is the progressive attempt to undermine all shared public institutions by turning them into left-wing megaphones and in the process condoning the use of violence, obscenity, and racialism.

So it is not quite accurate to complain of the “politicization of everything,” given that the phenomenon is largely a progressive project in which nothing is much sacred from left-wing political hectoring — our vocabulary, the very cars we drive, even the TV shows we watch.

No Escape

Why are the major private research universities such as Yale, Harvard, Duke, and Stanford, not just liberal but fully in service to a left-wing social agenda? Do they not all pile up huge billion-dollar endowments that are not taxed, thus robbing taxpayers of considerable annual revenue, while they turn out more biased yet less educated students?

Network news was always liberal. Yet in the last decade, ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with PBS and NPR, as well as their cable counterparts such as CNN, have become veritable progressive operatives. Mention of transgenderism, gay marriage, abortion, global warming, and identity politics will be massaged to promote a progressive position that was once held only by minority — until the position morphs into an intolerant mainstream orthodoxy that does not allow dissent.

Sometimes the scripted metamorphosis takes just a few years. Obama’s loud support of traditional marriage in 2008 changed to support for gay marriage in 2012. And when he left office, he conformed to the idea that only homophobes agreed with the position he’d held a few years earlier. Bill Clinton’s stance not too long ago on legal-only immigration would reduce him to a nativist racist by today’s progressive standards.

No Way to Treat Old Glory The American flag is not to be trifled with. By Rich Lowry

Old Glory is almost certainly the most honored flag in the world.

The late political scientist Samuel Huntington marveled at its place in our national life: We pledge allegiance to it. The national anthem celebrates it. An incredibly elaborate code stipulates how it is to be displayed, handled, and maintained. It even has its own holiday.

“Since the Civil War,” Huntington wrote, “Americans have been a flag-oriented people. The Stars and Stripes has the status of a religious icon and is a more central symbol of national identity for Americans than their flags are for peoples of other nations.”

The NFL players who kneel during the national anthem — a phenomenon that increased exponentially after President Donald Trump colorfully demanded that they stand — are disrespecting the most potent and enduring national symbol of the most patriotic nation on Earth.

Not only are they wrong to do so, they aren’t delivering the devastating rebuke to Trump that they may imagine.

The power of national — or imperial — symbols isn’t anything new. The Romans couldn’t abide the collective disgrace of losing their standards to the enemy in battle, and would undertake great exertions to win them back.

The American flag is layered with history and meaning. As Tim Marshall recounts in his book A Flag Worth Dying For, its roots probably reach back prior to the country’s independence. It may owe its red and white stripes to the flag of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary agitators who carried out the Boston Tea Party.

The “rebellious stripes” of that flag, lacking a field of stars, don’t look like much. In 1777, the Continental Congress added the stars — “white in a blue field representing a new constellation.”

The flag took time to catch on. The Civil War, which tested the integrity of the flag, represented a watershed. It came to be known as Old Glory at this time courtesy of a cussed merchant seaman named William Driver, who demonstrated a characteristic American attitude to the Stars and Stripes.

Driver had retired to Nashville, Tennessee, with his flag still in his possession. When local Confederates demanded that he hand it over, he replied that they were welcome to take it … over his dead body. Secreted away in a bed quilt, the flag was eventually handed over to Union forces, and the legend of Old Glory spread.

After the war, Union veterans advocated for the display of the flag and for its veneration. The National Flag Conference of 1923 — yes, there was a national flag conference — set out the code subsequently adopted by Congress.

Per the code, “the flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.” It states that “no disrespect should be shown to the flag,” and when it is taken down, it should be placed into “waiting hands and arms.”

Who’s Divisive — the President or the Players? How the Left has twisted the NFL kneeling controversy. Dennis Prager

Because the left dominates the news media, the entertainment media and academia, Americans are swimming — actually, drowning — in an ocean of lies.

Here are a few examples:

America is racist.

America oppresses its minorities.

America oppresses women.

Universities have a culture of rape.

There are more than two genders.

All cultures are morally and culturally equal.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were caused, or made more intense, by global warming.

Israel is the villain in the Middle East conflict.

Western civilization is a euphemism for “white supremacy.”

The latest lie of the left is that, with regard to the conflict between the NFL and President Donald Trump, the president is the “divisive” party.

Whenever people on the left tell one of these lies, I always wonder if they really believe it. I have concluded that they nearly always do. Which is more frightening than if they knew they weren’t telling the truth. With people who know they aren’t telling the truth there is always hope. But there is no hope for people who believe their lies.

What other conclusion could any fair-minded person reach when people say with a straight face that Trump is the divisive party with regard to his conflict with players refusing to stand for the National Anthem?

Apparently, the question, “Who started it?” means nothing to the journalists, politicians and NFL players, coaches and owners who call the president “divisive.”

So, before discussing Trump’s reaction, our fellow Americans on the left need to answer some pretty simple questions: Has the behavior of those athletes has been divisive? Is kneeling while tens of thousands of people are standing divisive? Is publicly showing contempt for the American flag for which innumerable Americans risked their lives, were terribly injured, or died divisive?

The answers are so obvious that if someone denies that those actions are divisive, it inevitably raises another question:

Why would anyone deny it?

Here are three likely reasons:

First, most people on the left think that they are centrists, or at most center-liberal. Therefore, they deem whatever they believe to be normative and deem whoever differs with them to be divisive and ultimately extremist.

This is true for every issue. Take same-sex marriage. Redefining marriage to include two people of the same sex was the most radical change in the history of the family — far more radical than, say, banning polygamy. Yet, I have never read or heard a person who favored same-sex marriage acknowledge that this was a radical change, not to mention divisive. On the contrary, people on the left believe that all those who wanted to retain the only definition of marriage any society has ever had — the union between the two sexes — are divisive and extremist.

Likewise, in the eyes of the left — the media, academia and the Democratic Party — it is not professional athletes who have refused to stand for the national anthem who are divisive; it is the president and all others who condemn the players for doing so.

Was the president’s rhetoric over the top? I believe some of it was — specifically, calling the players “sons of b———.” No politician, let alone the president of the United States, should use expletives publicly.

But if the president had sharply rebuked the players and the NFL using soaring rhetoric, the left would have similarly accused him of being divisive.

Imagine the president had begun his comments by saying something along these lines:

“To see professional athletes publicly dishonor the flag for which hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, the flag that millions of Americans have seen drape the coffin of their child, their spouse, their sibling, their parent, or other loved one is as morally repulsive as it un-American. Of course, these players have the right of free speech — and so do I, and that is precisely the right I am exercising now.”

Had he spoken that way, would the left not have characterized him as divisive?

There is a second reason the left portrays the president, not the players, as divisive. They agree with the players that the flag represents a systemically and socially racist country. How could they not? The left is the primary reason many Americans believe that America, the least racist multiracial country in history, is a racist country.

A third reason the left calls the president, not the players, “divisive” is that the left will say anything about those with whom it differs. The left sees language as a tool — not with which to express truth but with which to defeat its enemies. From Stalin calling Trotsky a fascist to the American media calling Trump and his supporters “Nazis” and “white supremacists,” lying about one’s political enemies is as part of leftism as hydrogen and oxygen are of water.

And why have non-leftist NFL coaches and owners also called the president “divisive?” Because they if they told the truth — that the players are the divisive party here — they would have no team.

Trump Should Reject Fatally Flawed International Institutions Why the U.S. needs to opt out. Bruce Thornton

Donald Trump campaigned and was elected as an agent of radical change. He promised to roll back the policies on big government at home and transnational cooperation abroad that both parties have endorsed for years. His campaign rhetoric about the “useless UN” and the “unfair” Paris Climate Accords suggested he understood that such organizations and treaties fleece Americans while handing over national sovereignty to other countries eager to gain leverage over us.

But Trump’s recent comments about renegotiating the Paris agreement and reforming the UN imply an acceptance of the assumptions on which both are built: that multilateral cooperation is better able to serve the interests and security of the United States. If this is so, then Trump is buying into the flaws of those assumptions that need to be utterly discredited in order to enact meaningful change.

Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate agreement was correct not just because it is a bad deal for our economy. Nor is withdrawal called for because, like previous meetings–– in Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, Lima, and now Paris––the results of these international gabfests have done nothing to reduce CO2 and mitigate the alleged apocalyptic consequences of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. But they’ve done plenty to enrich some countries at the expense of others, while profiting the “green energy” industries and hustlers like Al Gore.

So even if one believes in anthropogenic global warming, the Paris accord is a bad deal. The US would commit to a 30% reduction in carbon emissions, at the cost of an overall average of 400,000 fewer jobs, 200,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, a $20,000 loss in income for a family of four, an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion, and increases in household electricity spending between 13% and 20%. And for what would the average American pay? According to the Heritage Foundation,

Using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change developed by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even if all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were effectively eliminated, there would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures. In fact, the entire industrialized world could cut carbon emissions down to zero, and the climate impact would still be less than four-tenths of a degree Celsius in terms of averted warming by the year 2100.

Worse yet, history teaches us that such an agreement is made to be broken, or sacrificed to national interests, or manipulated to benefit cronyism and rent-seeking. So while the US has reduced emissions by 12.2% since their peak in 2007, and 2.5% between 2014 and 2015, the EU, despite spending $1.2 trillion supporting green energy, saw an almost one percent increase in emissions over that same period. Nor have the US reductions been caused by government policies and regulations. The development of hydraulic fracturing extraction techniques––banned in the EU and hindered by Obama’s environmental policies–– has increased the amount of cleaner natural gas available to replace coal as an energy source.

Thus the US––in the teeth of Democrat-supporting environmental and green energy lobbies, and Obama’s multiple regulations targeting energy production–– has seen the market more effectively reduce emissions; while the EU has regulated and subsidized into existence electricity costs that are 2.5 times more expensive than in America. At the same time, an economic and geopolitical rival like China, responsible for 28% of total emissions in 2015, will continue to increase its emissions until 2030, when it promises to start reducing them.

U. Chicago and DePaul: Promoting the Terrorist Narrative Two Chicago-area campuses demonstrate their support for Hamas. Sara Dogan

As revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestratedand funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. The report and posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled Stop University Support for Terrorists. Images of the posters that appeared at Chicago, DePaul, and other campuses may be viewed at www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.

University of Chicago:

The University of Chicago is home to a highly active SJP chapter that hosts frequent events and speakers to promote the Hamas-supported and funded BDS movement against Israel. These speakers include BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti who condoned anti-Israel terrorism in his address to students. SJP also hosts a yearly “Nakba Week” during which they commemorate the “catastrophe” that was the founding of Israel. UC’s SJP chapter is also known for disrupting pro-Israel events and speakers and recently threatened Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid who came to speak on U. Chicago’s campus about the oppression of Palestinians by the theocratic terrorist regimes in the West Bank and Gaza

In recent years, a coalition callings itself U of C Divest has formed on campus and gained widespread support among other student organizations. The coalition succeeded in passing a BDS resolution in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the measure, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was proposed and rejected. The coalition has also pressured UC’s trustees to divest the university’s investments from Israel by delivering over 300 signed letters to the Investment Committee and making its case in the campus paper, the Chicago Maroon.

Supporting Evidence:

In June 2017, the U. Of C. Divest coalition proudly announced that they had delivered 300 signed letters to the Investment Committee of the U. Chicago Board of Trustees that demanded that the university divest from “Israeli apartheid”—thus promoting the Hamas supported and funded BDS movement against Israel. The coalition also demanded that the Board create a “Socially Responsible Investment Committee.”

On May 18, 2017, the Chicago Maroon published an op-ed by a Ph.D. student urging the campus administration to take action against David Horowitz and the David Horowitz Freedom Center for placing posters on campus that exposed the links between SJP and the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. The op-ed urged the administration to silence Horowitz, stating “In comments to The Maroon last year, David Horowitz said that the University should hold him personally responsible for the posters. So why haven’t they?… In an era when mosques are being burned down across the United States week after week and where students who wear hijabs are spat on and yelled at every day across the city, shouldn’t confronting anti-Muslim bigotry be a priority? If the University is serious about protecting its students and employees, shouldn’t it address the David Horowitz Freedom Center and demand the group cease and desist from its repeated attacks on University students and employees?” The op-ed did not consider the view that the Freedom Center’s posters presented important facts and information and that universities should be open to a diversity of viewpoints. Or that in America we are governed by a Bill of Rights that guarantees our right to express opinions that terrorist sympathizers and activists might not agree with.

During May 2017, UC SJP again celebrated “Nakba Week”on campus. “Nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe” which Hamas and its allies use to refer to the creation of Israel. Social media advertisements for the Week stated, “The 1948 expulsion of over 700,000 natives from Palestine is referred to by Palestinians as “al-Nakba” (“the catastrophe”). Understanding the Nakba as an ongoing process inherent to settler colonialism is crucial in understanding everything from the illegal occupation to the refugee crisis to the fight for equal rights within modern-day Israel.” But the only actual “settler colonialism” in the Middle East is the historic conquest of the region by the Arabs.

In April 2017, the U. of C. Divest coalition held an event to promote the BDS boycott against Israel and to encourage university trustees to divest from Israeli companies titled “BDS 101: #TelltheTrustees.” The coalition also created and posted a “fact sheet” on social media that promotes Hamas propaganda and misinformation about Israel. One claim states, “In Gaza, Palestinians live with the threat of regular Israeli bombing and ground invasions, which often have civilian casualty rates as high as 70% according to the UN. In the West Bank, Palestinians are constantly harassed and attacked at checkpoints by the Israeli military, who face practical immunity for killing innocent Palestinians.”

The Chicago Maroon, the independent campus newspaper, published a letter to the editor in April 2017 promoting the genocidal and Hamas-inspired and funded BDS movement against Israel. The letter repeated Hamas propaganda lies, asserting that Israel is “a system of rule fully comparable to South African Apartheid” and accused Israel of “steal[ing] Palestinian land, bomb[ing] Palestinian homes, kidnap[ping] Palestinian children, deny[ing] Palestinians access to resources, harass[ing] Palestinians at checkpoints, and imprison[ing] Palestinians without charge.”

On January 25, 2017, SJP at the University of Chicago hosted an event titled BDS 101: Trump and Palestinian Human Rights. The event promoted the Hamas-supported BDS movement against Israel.

Break Up the NFL’s Corrupt Dem Monopoly Why it’s high time for the NFL to take a knee.Daniel Greenfield

An Army recruit starts off with a salary under $20,000. Thousands of active duty military personnel are on food stamps. Millions of veterans rely on them to feed their families and themselves.

That’s how we treat the best of us. Here’s how we treat the worst of us.

An NFL rookie’s minimum salary is $465,000. And the majority of NFL players are usually bankrupt a few years after retirement because they blew through most of their money. Dozens of NFL players are arrested every year on charges ranging from murder to rape to animal abuse.

2017 was a banner year for the NFL with three times as many arrests as last year.

Along with the usual drunk driving and disorderly conduct arrests, there were 7 arrests for assault/battery, 6 for drugs and 5 for domestic violence.

The Seattle Seahawks announced that they weren’t going to “participate in the national anthem” because of the “injustice that has plagued people of color in this country”. While they lost that game, they are one of the top ranked teams in arrests. Alongside the Los Angeles Rams, the Green Bay Packers and the New York Jets, all of whom showed some solidarity with the anti-American protests, these top NFL criminal teams have racked up arrests for domestic violence, drugs, DUI and assault and battery.

Is it any wonder they think the justice system is unfair? They’re criminals.

Broncos linebacker Brandon Marshall was one of the early players to reject the Anthem. The Broncos supported his actions. As his teams have supported him during nine domestic violence accusations.

Did any of the women he stabbed, punched or choked have any choice about taking a knee?

It’s no wonder that so many of the NFL’s millionaire scumbags are eager to join Colin Kaepernick’s protests against the justice system by degrading our anthem.

It’s because they’re criminals.

And it’s no wonder that the NFL stands behind its thugs. If a team can shrug at a 6’4 man beating a woman, what’s a little anti-American tantrum by a prize property that makes them millions of dollars?

The only question is why are the rest of us subsidizing it?

A Lying Quartet By Victor Davis Hanson *****

Rarely has an intelligence apparatus engaged in systematic lying—and chronic deceit about its lying—both during and even after its tenure. Yet the Obama Administration’s four top security and intelligence officials time and again engaged in untruth, as if peddling lies was part of their job descriptions.

So far none have been held accountable. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/25/a-lying-quartet/
Those exemptions are likely because, in hubristic fashion, all four assumed their service to progressive noble agendas would justify any odious means felt necessary to achieve them.

In part their liberal credentials were seen as guarantees that the media either would ignore or excuse their dissimulation. And in part, untruth was innate to them as lifelong and now seasoned Washington bureaucrats. Their reasons to be in Washington were largely a quest for media exposure, government sinecures, revolving door profiteering, and maintaining a host of subordinate toadies at their service. A harsh assessment, perhaps—but lying to the American people earns them such disdain.
Politically Correct Deception

Former Obama United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice was rarely credible in any of her major public statements. Her dissimulation bordered on the pathological. Indeed, it went beyond even the demands put upon her for partisan spinning.

On five occasions, Rice lied to the media that the murder of Americans in Benghazi, Libya by al-Qaida affiliated-terrorists was a result of spontaneous rioting—in response to an obscure, rogue, and right-wing Coptic filmmaker. She later attributed such dissimulation to a lack of information, when we now know that the truth of Benghazi—and the larger landscape of events that ensured something like a Benghazi—were only too known. The video was a canard.

Rice assured the nation that the AWOL and traitorous Bowe Bergdahl was a hostage taken during combat and had served nobly (“with honor and distinction”). In fact, the renegade Bergdahl likely was exchanged for terrorist prisoners for two reasons: one, to diminish the number of terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as promised by Obama during his campaign, and two, to highlight the humanitarian skills of Barack Obama in bringing home an American “hero,” especially defined as one who was so loudly aware of his own country’s foibles.

Rice also assured the nation that her administration, through its diplomatic brilliance, had eliminated Bashar Assad’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical-weapons stockpile,” she lied. That supposed coup was worth the price of inviting in the Russians to the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus. In fact, almost immediately after entering office, President Trump was forced to bomb Assad’s WMD depots to prevent Syria’s air force from dropping more nerve gas on civilians.

Susan Rice

Once House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced that key administration officials illegally might have unmasked and leaked the names of U.S. citizens on government intercepts connected to the Trump campaign and transition team, Rice issued a blanket denial (“I know nothing about this”). That assertion predictably was untrue, as Rice herself was forced to concede when she altered narratives to later justify rather than deny her role in such improper leaking.

Rice assured the nation there were no hidden side-deals in the Iran Deal, such as a prisoner-swap concession. “And we were very specific about the need not to link their fate to that of the negotiations, because we had no idea for certain whether negotiations would succeed or fail. We didn’t want to give the Iranians a bargaining chip to use against us in the negotiations,” she fibbed. In response, Americans knew almost immediately by her disavowals that there were quid pro quo hostage-prisoner trades that put the United States at a disadvantage.

Rice displayed an eerie habit of broadcasting her lies by preemptive denial that she was about to lie. In her case, the privileged Rice sometimes fell back on the boilerplate victimhood defense of racism and sexism. More likely, as with many Obama officials, she felt certain she could deceive with impunity out of contempt for the American non-elite and, like her associate Ben Rhodes, with full confidence in the obsequiousness and incompetence of the “know-nothing” media.

Boy Scout Sanctimonious Deception

Former FBI Director James Comey long ago lost his carefully crafted Boy Scout image of a truth-teller, buffeted in a sea of Washington deception. Like Rice, when Comey signals he cannot lie or that others are lying, we know that his own duplicity is forthcoming. The list of his untruths and unprofessionalism is growing, as continuous disclosures cannot be synced with either his congressional testimony or his public statements.

German Election: Merkel’s Pyrrhic Victory “Ms. Merkel is in effect a lame duck.”by Soeren Kern

“Angela Merkel has ruled this country for twelve years. She has imposed a debt burden of billions on the Germans to protect the southern part of Europe from collapsing and to implement her idea of ​​a European community. She has shaken the German energy industry to save the world’s climate. And she has opened the gates of the country to hundreds of thousands of refugees because she considered it a humanitarian obligation. She also changed the traditional notion of marriage, as marriage of husband and wife, just like that….” — Tagesspiegel.

“We will reclaim our country and our people.” — Alexander Gauland, a former CDU official who is now co-chairman of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

“The reality is that as of today, September 24, Ms. Merkel is in effect a lame duck.” — Handelsblatt.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term in office, but the real winner of the German election on September 24 was the Alternative for Germany, an upstart party that harnessed widespread anger over Merkel’s decision to allow into the country more than a million mostly Muslim migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Preliminary election results show that Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU alliance won around 33% of the vote, its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz and his center-left SPD, won 20.5%, the party’s worst-ever showing.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won around 13% to become the country’s third-largest party, followed by the classical liberal Free Democrats (FDP) with 10.7%, the far-left Linke party with 9.2% and the environmentalist Greens with 8.9%.

“With only 33%, Merkel has not only achieved the worst result of all the campaigns she has led, but also the second-worst in the party’s history,” wrote Die Zeit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to the media in Berlin on September 25, the day after her CDU/CSU party alliance won first place with 32.9% of the vote — its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Merkel now has two main options for building a governing coalition: a so-called grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, or a three-way coalition comprising the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the Greens. Building a stable coalition will be difficult, given that all the parties have differing ideologies, platforms and priorities.

Merkel has governed twice in a grand coalition with the SPD and once in coalition with the FDP. Schulz has insisted that the SDP will not agree to another grand coalition because it would leave the AfD as Germany’s main opposition party, which would give it special rights and privileges in parliament.

Canada Refuses Entry to Chelsea Manning for Crime That Would ‘Equate’ to ‘Treason’ By Stephen Kruiser

Chelsea Manning, a former American soldier jailed for leaking troves of classified information, said on Monday that she was banned from entering Canada due to criminal convictions in the United States.

Manning had tried to cross at the official border office at Lacolle, Quebec, on Friday. On Monday, she posted a letter from Canadian immigration officials to her Twitter account that said she was not admitted because she was convicted of offences deemed equivalent to treason in Canada.

“So, I guess Canada has permanently banned me? Denied entry b/c of convictions similar to “treason” offence,” she wrote.

The document said that Manning had committed a crime outside the country that “would equate to an indictable offence, namely treason” in Canada and which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment.

Committing a crime elsewhere that would carry a maximum sentence of at least 10 years in Canada is grounds for a person to be denied entry, the document said.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, declined to comment “on any specific case” at a news conference, and said he looked “forward to seeing more details about this situation.”

Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale suggested on Monday he would think hard before overruling a border officer’s decision.

“No such request has been made to me with respect to that matter,” Mr Goodale said, according to the National Post.

Profile | Chelsea Manning

“And, when a Canada Border Services officer has exercised appropriately within their jurisdiction the judgment that they are called upon to make, I don’t interfere in that process in any kind of a light or cavalier manner.”

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks three years earlier, when she was known as Bradley.

She served seven years, and twice tried to take her own life last year alone, before then-president Barack Obama commuted her sentence just days before he left office in January.

Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth’s all-male prison in May.

During her incarceration, Manning battled for – and won – the right to start hormone treatment. She now has cropped blonde hair and a decidedly feminine look.

Shall We Have a Conversation About Arrest Statistics for Those Privileged NFL Players? By Jeff Reynolds

An NFL player is arrested, on average, every seven days.

Did you know, that as of this writing, it’s been 24 days since an NFL player was arrested? The odds that we would go that long in between player arrests are 25 to 1! In case you were wondering, there’s an entire website dedicated to tracking all the NFL players who have been arrested.

Oops. I just checked again. It’s now been zero days since an NFL player was arrested. Thanks, Los Angeles Ram Ethan Westbrooks! Westbrooks was arrested this weekend for speeding and being in possession of an unlicensed firearm. This is the second time in bracelets this year for Westbrooks, who was arrested in March on suspicion of domestic violence (the charges were later dropped).

According to NFLArrest.com, the record span between arrests is 65 days. The average span between player arrests is seven days. The site has been tracking player arrests since 2000 and has an interactive breakdown of all the data. You can track arrests by team, date, day of the week (unsurprisingly, Saturday is most popular), player position, or type of crime.

The NFL has been in the national spotlight for several years in relation to its personal conduct policy. High-profile cases involving domestic violence, in particular, have caused the NFL a great measure of embarrassment as the league has struggled to determine the appropriate level of punishment. According to its written policy:

The policy states that anyone associated with the NFL can be disciplined under this policy regardless of whether they are convicted of a crime. Players who have been arrested are routinely suspended by the league. It’s become almost routine to view the police blotter as a normal aspect of reporting on the NFL. CONTINUE AT SITE